Obama Budget: Help Rich Buy Volts, Hurt Poor D.C. School Kids

In what should surprise no one, Obama’s budget panders to the .000001% who might consider purchasing a Chevy Pyre (via Hot Air)

(Daily Caller) The White House intends to boost government subsidies for wealthy buyers of the Chevy Volt and other new-technology vehicles – to $10,000 per buyer.

That mammoth subsidy would cost taxpayers $100 million each year if it is approved by Congress, presuming only 10,000 new-technology autos are sold each year.

The average income of the Chevy Volt’s buyers is $170,000 per year, according to General Motors CEO Dan Akerson. “Some of them – I think roughly half – are either [Toyota] Prius or BMW owners,” Akerson said in a Dec. 16 interview with the Associated Press.

This is a bit of pandering to the auto union which builds the TurtleFire, and would also apply to other all-electric and natural gas technology vehicles. Interestingly, it doesn’t apply to hybrids, such as the Prius and Ford Escape Hybrid, which actually tend to sell, unlike Volts. But, hey, it’s all good if you are in the 7% income bracket which purchases these vehicles (which are already being predicted to have horrible appraisal values, because no one is sure how long they will last, and dealers are worried about them sitting on lots wasting capital).

On the flip side, Obama isn’t too keep on helping out poor snowflakes in D.C., the one place the federal government is actually responsible for school spending

(Heritage) The Obama administration is once again standing with education special interest groups and against low-income children in Washington, D.C. His 2013 budget request zeros out funding for the highly successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which was revived last year thanks to the hard work of Speaker John Boehner and the thousands of D.C. families who received scholarships to attend a private school of choice.

The D.C. OSP has been highly successful. According to federally-mandated evaluations of the program, student achievement has increased, and graduation rates of voucher students have increased significantly. While graduation rates in D.C. Public Schools hover around 55 percent, students who used a voucher to attend private school had a 91 percent graduation rate.

And at $8,000, the vouchers are a bargain compared to the estimated $18,000 spent per child by D.C. Public Schools.

Again, this is a sop to another core left wing group, the teachers unions, who have never liked the vouchers program, since this puts impressionable children in schools not run by those same unions. Because they have never been about the education of the children.